Although both Tatsuichi Horikiri's The Stories Clothes Tell: Voices of Working-Class Japan and James Huffman's Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan seek to illuminate the lives of Japan's poor in the early decades of the twentieth century, the approaches they take could not be more different. Read “against” each other, the two volumes raise compelling questions about the method, aims, and audience for works of history, especially those that explore the lives of marginalized people whose “voices” are often absent from conventional historical sources.

Horikiri's work, originally published in Japanese in 1990, has been edited and translated by Rieko Wagoner, who is to be commended for making this evocative work available to non-Japanese readers. Born in 1925 in Kagoshima, Horikiri left Japan for a job in northern China in 1943 but was soon conscripted into the Japanese army. After its defeat and his repatriation, he began to pursue an unusual hobby, collecting the used clothing of working people, an avocation that became a full-time pursuit after his retirement from a career in the construction industry in 1980. His collection of more than 3,500 items is now housed in the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History, where Horikiri has an affiliation as a research fellow (Horikiri, pp. xv–xvi). Beginning in the 1980s—ironically, the era of Japan's bubble economy and of excessive and conspicuous consumption—Horikiri, an autodidactic historian of talent and imagination, began to write essays for newspapers and magazines on the articles of clothing he had collected from around Japan. This volume brings together thirty-one of those essays. Beautifully translated with a thoughtful introduction, this work reminds us of how powerful histories of material culture can be.

In the original 1990 Japanese work, Horikiri's essays were organized by their date of publication. In contrast, Wagoner has reorganized them in a loosely chronological manner, so that the volume begins with articles of clothing from the early 1900s and ends with those that date from the wartime and early postwar eras. The essays are quite brief, but the five or six pages Horikiri devotes to each item blends careful attention to its material qualities with a discussion of how he came to obtain it, speculation on its original owner, and observations about its representational value vis-à-vis the lived experience of working-class people. Proceeding in this way, Horikiri makes a koshimaki (petticoat)—“a tattered piece of cloth made of eighty-two mismatching pieces of fabric” (Horikiri, p. 6)—into a powerful emblem of the poverty but also the skill and diligence of its owner, perhaps a peasant woman, who carefully patched it using bits of cloth at hand. Similarly, Horikiri uses a mabubeko (mining skirt)—a brief apron-like garment worn by female coal miners, who labored in the filthy, stifling mines naked but for this garment, which barely covered their genitals—to argue that concerns about modesty, sexuality, and personal dignity persisted even amid such conditions.

Huffman's Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan is almost three times longer than Horikiri's work but ultimately it is a less satisfying attempt to document the lives of Japan's most impoverished citizens. To be sure, this is a competent piece of historical writing and research. Huffman has diligently mined government reports, journalist reportage, and literary texts and describes in considerable detail the working conditions, budgets, homes, family life, and amusements of Tokyo's urban poor in the first five chapters of this work. The last two chapters provide more cursory descriptions of the lives of the rural poor (chapter 7) and of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii (chapter 8). The point of these chapters is to demonstrate that while poverty was difficult and unpleasant for everyone, the situation of the urban poor was particularly bad (small comfort, I suspect, to the impoverished tenant farmer or plantation worker).

Huffman's “method,” if such a term is appropriate, is thick description, and there is little attempt to push beyond the documentation of conditions. The concern for description over analysis is most apparent in the failure to look beyond the homogenizing gaze of the authors of his sources. Indeed, he adopts their terminology and uses hinmin (paupers) and hinminkutsu (caverns of the poor, i.e., slums) throughout this work. The tendency to generalize leaves unexamined a number of important distinctions between the working poor who struggled to make ends meet and the truly destitute, who survived by begging and theft, and between the “new” poor and the “old” poor; that is, between those who had recently fallen upon hard times and those who were part of an urban underclass that dated back a generation or more. The latter is significant in that Huffman argues that the rural poor were better off than their urban counterparts because they had the “cushion” of longstanding social ties to neighbors and others. The discussion of the causal factors of growing rates of poverty is also simplistic. Huffman repeatedly points to “modernity” and “capitalism” as the culprits, ignoring the macroeconomic factors and policy decisions that created a growing economic divide in this period. To cite just one example, while Huffman spends considerable time discussing the low wages paid to those who did piecework, he shows no interest in considering whether, for example, the owner of a match factory, who exported his matches to India, really grew rich off the women and children he employed. Or was he, like many would-be entrepreneurs in this era, always on the brink of falling into poverty himself?

Interestingly, Huffman suggests that the poor of Tokyo shared his perspective and blamed “modernity” for their plight, writing in one instance that “modernity looked to them [the poor] more like a cruel master than a beacon of hope” (Huffman, p. 67). However, he never pursues that question of how or when a historical consciousness of modernity took form and to what effect. Ignoring the widespread discussion among bureaucrats and others about how to fight poverty, the admittedly limited institutional efforts to address it (via the establishment of the Tokyo Poor House and public leprosy sanitaria, for example), and the efforts of Japan's early socialists to organize and edify the poor, Huffman castigates Meiji society in moral terms for its “criminal” indifference. He is not indifferent to the issue of subjectivity: indeed, chapter 6 is devoted to the recovery of what Huffman terms the “agency” of the poor, a term that would benefit from some explication. But the suggestion of both an enthusiasm for festivals and fireworks and the occasional participation of some in strikes and demonstrations leaves unexplored the crucial question of when and how Japan's poorest citizens developed a sense of themselves as political subjects in a modern nation-state.

What then of audience? Horikiri, to be sure, wrote originally for a general Japanese readership, but this work has much to teach both professional historians and the students we teach about how to look beyond the textual sources upon which we rely and the standard form of the academic essay. Huffman's intended audience is less clear to me. His careful attention to “authorities” in the field—“Harvard University historian David Howell,” “Amy Stanley of Northwestern University,” “labor historian Andrew Gordon,” and “Richard Smethurst of the University of Pittsburgh” (Huffman pp. 73, 90, 162, 189)—suggest an imagined student readership, but few professors are going to assign a 300+-page book to their classes and even fewer undergraduates are likely to pay the $68.00 list price.